Have you seen Colonel Angus?

"McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man. But he's still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in."

John Dramesi,Air Force lieutenant colonel who was imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam and a peer of McCain's.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/10/scales-eyes-mcc.html

dead ringer for colonel Rosa Klebb, agent of S.P.E.C.T.R.E.

The Colonel was a respectable man. Ironic that KFC turned into the abomination of human and animal suffering it is today. I found a full liver, kidney and digestive tract in my chicken the other day. Fed it to my cat, thinking about returning to veganism.

you already got halfway to sifted the first time, so *kill this one and i'll promotify the original. k?

I have verifiable solid sources posted above from a Navy JAG Admiral and a USAF Colonel plus 2 recent presidents. Sorry but my sources seem to trump yours volumptuous.

LT Colonel Grossman, states in his book on killing a percent of people when the shit hits the fan they will shit, piss, or puke on themselves. Some become accute psychological Casualties, and more become minor psychological casualties.

I don't have the book on me so I cant quote the exact number he writes, relevance to this? Just about any one would have probably shit or piss themselves.

For us armchair types read up on the above book then we may know a little something about what its like.

"As far as you, this particular Colonel might have never worked with armor"

Actually he was an Armored Colonel. Since when do Chaplains, Lawyers or Doctors command assaulting regiments? You're really overreaching here.

"Maybe he was briefed that he would be looking at the UK counterpart to the Bradley"

Maybe, if so the people who briefed him were idiots. The Scorpion is a light tank and plays a completely different role. In any case I didn't know a single soldier in my time with the armored who couldn't identify 99% of the armored vehicles in service from front or side silhouettes or from a picture ESPECIALLY not ones so common as a Scorpion and a Bradley. The zipperheads drilled on that stuff all the time.

When I was in Basic Training we had a US Marine who'd served for 5 years in the US forces in my platoon. He was a dual Canadian/US citizen and after working with the Canadian forces on an exercise he saw the difference in calibre and enrolled in the Canadian forces. He said that Canadian basic training was tougher than anything he'd gone through as a marine.

EVERY enlisted member goes through that training.

Really if you've never worked extensively with other forces what position are you in to compare?

In front of CFB Shilo there is an M109 which was LOST by American forces on exercise. For those who don't know an M109 is mobile artillery, it looks like a tank only taller. After a US exercise on a Canadian base it's common to find teepees made of M16s that have been left behind. These are not things competent soldiers do.

Drachen, I'm inclined to take offense, and I'm sure MarineGunRock will be as well.

Ive been in the service for 5 years now, and sure there are a couple soldiers here and there who are on the slow side, but to say we're barely literate and lazy? Thats just bad form. A good deal many of us soldiers have college degrees. In fact, a lot more than you would think. Thats a pretty broad generalization, and an insulting one at that.

On top of that, your talking about lazy, uneducated, barely literate troops, and you reference air to ground blue on blue. In order to fly you have to be an officer with college. Get your facts straight.

"What at hell kind of Bradley is that?" Man, oh man. That could have been meant is 20 different ways. As far as you, this particular Colonel might have never worked with armor, and was a doctor, or a layer. You don't know. Maybe a chaplain? Just because one man is uninformed as to foreign armored vehicles doesn't mean shit. Maybe he was briefed that he would be looking at the UK counterpart to the Bradley and he meant it in jest, as it resembles a Bradley, but much smaller.

The utter absurdity of your comment has my mind spinning in circles. BLECH

These incidents involving American troops are far too common for the fault to be evenly split down the middle in all cases.

During the first Gulf War I saw some footage of a spotter calling in an air strike on what was obviously (even through the camera) a Bradley and not a BMP (as the spotter called it). Plane came down and killed 9 American soldiers in about a quarter of a second, pilot (over the radio), "I believe that was a friendly, over." Spotter (to camera crew), "Damn I was afraid of that".

3/4ths of American combat casualties in the first Gulf War were from friendly fire.

I visited with the 17/21st Lancers in England not long after Gulf war I, some of the Scorpion crews told us a story about how when their Colonel met up with his American counterpart in the neighbouring regiment the US Colonel looked at the Scorpion and said, "What the hell kind of Bradley is that?"

In the 2nd Gulf war the British forces refused to serve alongside American troops, which is why they had their own separate domain (Basra and surrounding area).

In my experience working with US soldiers they are barely literate, under educated, lazy and incompetent. I have no doubt that most or all of the blame in most of these cases lies with the American troops because of an overreaction to the pathetic hit ratio of ground forces in Vietnam (1 confirmed hit per million rounds expended for small arms). Now troops are trained to shoot before they think and this is the consequence.

I've never seen more than brief clips of this debate before. I find myself transfixed, wondering what kind of country this used to be if they televised stuff like this...and people actually tuned in.

We really have declined as a civilization.

Still, while I'm no historical scholar, and when they ventured away from WWII and Vietnam, I was lost for what allegorical point they were trying to make at times, the whole thing appeared to boil down to the precursor of this:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Bill-OReilly-cuts-mic-of-retired-Army-Colonel-Ann-Wright

Buckley interrupts, generalizes, minimizes all attempts by Chomsky to categorize different types of intervention as being qualitatively different in terms of their morality (with Buckley even contending that military aid isn't substantially different from economic aid) by calling them "differences in nomenclature".

Buckley has been to school, and his demeanor and vocabulary show it, but his reasoning is just as dogmatic as BillO's.

As far as who won the argument, I think it ended about as conclusively as the video of BillO cutting a mic. If Buckley won, it was simply because he filibustered Chomsky from getting a chance to fully make his point without having to field silly assertions every 30 seconds.

Kinda scary that the country is getting to have this debate again almost 40 years later. You'd have thought we learned our lessons from Vietnam.

I guess they did in a sense. From the point of view of someone who came out of Vietnam thinking it was a good thing until all those damned hippies ruined it by protesting, they've corrected many of their mistakes from Vietnam. A target country with lots of strategic and economic benefits to us. No draft. Big media campaign to build fear of the enemy, and to frame all dissent as "un-American". Censorship of protests. Censorship of footage of carnage from Iraq. Censorship of the funerals. The unloading of the coffins. Message-force-multipliers.

They learned a lot of lessons. Too bad they didn't learn that the war itself won't work.

- You want to know what happened then ?
- Will you shut your mouth ?
- He blew himself up.
- Stop it, Randy.
Our colonel, here, had a grenade
juggling act at Fort Bragg or wherever.
- Fort Benning.
- He was teaching hand-to-hand combat --
Randy, look at me when
you're talking to me, son.
I'm lookin', Frank.
His partner in the act was some captain.
- Major Vincent Squires.
- Yeah, whoever he was.
Before going on, they'd have themselves
a lo-cal breakfast:
a Screwdriver for Frank,
Bloody Mary for his partner.
No, Vincent drank
Sea Breezes.
Judge Advocate at Benning said Col.
Slade had four to his partner's one.
He's flying in class.
He gets all excited.
He starts pulling
the pins out.
One grenade
got away from him.
Boom.
The one that got away.
Oh, the pin was in...
Frank claims.
In or out, what
difference does it make ?
What kind of fucking lunatic
juggles grenades.
Vinnie came out okay.
And all Frank lost
was his eyesight.
- Wanna know the truth ?
- You got a handle on that,
do you, Randy ?
- He was an asshole before.
- Whoo-ah.
Now all he is
is a blind asshole.
-Whoo-ah.

PETA also seems to like its "celebrity" endorsements an awful lot - I upvote content, even if presenation is skewered towards the idea of "Evil Bloody Colonel"

As SouthPark put it, PETA Loves Animals - Hates People.

In 2005, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, publicly stated he could "testify to" Franks' 2004 comment, and added "Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man.

snow crash was right about "The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel"